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aboriginal policy studies aps Article Idle No More: A Movement of Dissent Jérôme Melançon La Cité universitaire francophone, Université de Regina aboriginal policy studies Vol. 7, no. 1, 2018, pp. 127-147 This article can be found at: http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/aps/article/view/28227 ISSN: 1923-3299 Article DOI: https://doi.org/10.5663/aps.v7i1.28943 aboriginal policy studies is an online, peer-reviewed and multidisciplinary journal that publishes origi- nal, scholarly, and policy-relevant research on issues relevant to Métis, non-status Indians and urban Aboriginal people in Canada. For more information, please contact us at [email protected] or visit our website at www.nativestudies.ualberta.ca/research/aboriginal-policy-studies-aps. Idle No More: A Movement of Dissent Jérôme Melançon La Cité universitaire francophone, Université de Regina Abstract: Idle No More is a movement of dissent insofar as it refused the reality and truth about Indigenous peoples that are imposed by the state and the majority of the settler population. In focusing on anticolonial dissent, Idle No More continues previous Indigenous movements, brings together existing movements and campaigns, and maintains open the questions of the goals to be pursued and of the means of pursuing them. The appeals to rights in Idle No More thus represent not only a judicial question but also the re-opening of political questions and the fundamental questioning of the existence of the Canadian state. Introduction In December of 2012 and January of 2013, under the collective name “Idle No More,” pro- tests and marches were organized in Ottawa and throughout the country, and round dances took place in public locations such as Midtown Plaza, a shopping mall in downtown Sas- katoon, and West Edmonton Mall. Although the attention given to the movement by the mainstream media quickly wavered, five years after these initial events, the phrase “Idle No More” and the hashtag #IdleNoMore continue to bear political meaning, and the resources of the movement continue to be used to mobilize Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike to demonstrate their opposition to the systemic injustice experienced by Indigenous people.1 In the first few months of its activity, which will be the focus of this study, Idle No More established itself as a movement not only through public manifestations such as those described above, which reached a wide public and brought attention to their positions, but also through teach-ins, which were its first public events in places such as North Battleford, SK, and Maskwacis (then Hobbema), AB; through its use of social media, which mobilized large numbers of Indigenous persons and communities as well as allies; and through the publication of personal statements, manifestoes, and theoretical texts by those who identified as being Idle No More. Since several studies of the movement’s public presence through demonstrations and social media have been published—and since the teach-ins remain available online—I offer a philosophical reading of the major texts published early 1 At the time of this paper’s revision, Idle No More encourages all people to take action in relation to the verdict of the jury that found Gerald Stanley not guilty of manslaughter or murder in the death of Colten Boushie, despite Stanley’s avowal that he was holding the gun that killed Boushie. This trial took place in North Battleford, where Idle No More first took shape. See http://www.idlenomore.ca/justice_for_colten_ boushie and Issa (2018). aboriginal policy studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2018 127 www.nativestudies.ualberta.ca/research/aboriginal-policy-studies-aps ISSN: 1923-3299 128 aboriginal policy studies on by participants in Idle No More and collected under the title The Winter We Danced. These texts are crucial for understanding the movement: many of the texts and manifestoes published early on would have been known by the authors of the later texts, and the ideas they put forward ran through the movement in other posts, tweets, speeches, and discussions. These texts made explicit the values that continue to be at the core of Idle No More and that allowed people of different cultural and political backgrounds to act in concert and create a movement. In giving an outline of the political philosophy that runs throughout these texts and that allowed for the convergence of perspectives drawing on different cultural, national, and ideological sources, I also aim to draw out one meaning of the movement—a meaning Euro-Canadian society and governments must understand if they are to truly engage in relations of mutual respect.2 I will argue that Idle No More was (and continues to be) a movement of dissent insofar as it refused a reality and a truth about Indigenous peoples that is imposed by the state and the majority of the population, as it rejected the settler colonial state itself and the ways of life its laws support (Wolfe 2006; Alfred and Corntassel 2005; Wotherspoon and Hansen 2013) and as it sought to open the possibility for the members and public of the movement to change this reality and live a truth that emerges from their own experiences and perspectives. First, I will describe Idle No More as a movement and discuss its goals and modes of action, so as to account for its political theory and practice, both of which question the foundations of the Canadian state. Second, I will present Idle No More as leading a form of anti-colonial dissent affirming values and social and political structures that are proper to Indigenous peoples and that seek to restore their ways of life and relationship to the land. And third, I will give an account of the recourse to rights in relation to cultural justice, the duty to consult, and nation-to-nation relationships, which gave it the form of a movement of dissent, as opening the possibility for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike to learn about and live the truth affirmed by Idle No More. Indeed, the central theoretical issue I address here is the need to distinguish dissent from protest, governance, or self- governance, for instance, so as to account for the emancipatory effects it had on those who participated in it, rather than focusing on its effect on the state and its legislation. The Shape of the Movement Connective Action and the Primacy of Face-to-face Relations Departing from protest or revolutionary movements, Idle No More can be described as belonging to a newer form of social movement based on connective action. Rather than being organizationally brokered (as in the case of collective action based on the important resources of organizations such as unions and NGOs, which allow them to involve their followers) or organizationally enabled (as in the case of connective action wherein several 2 I write from the perspective of a Euro-Canadian (a Canadian who is primarily of European descent and raised in cultural traditions stemming from Europe) and a settler. Idle No More: A Movement of Dissent 129 organizations rally around a theme or problem, allowing their members to be agents in de- fining the terms of their own participation), Idle No More was crowd-enabled, with digital media platforms adding to face-to-face encounters between individuals without the me- diation of organizations, using digital media “platforms as organizational hubs” (Bennett and Segerberg 2013, 13). Such social movements of contentious politics are personalized and “scale up more quickly; produce large and sometimes record-breaking mobilizations; display unusual flexibility in tracking moving political targets and bridging different issues…and build up adaptive protest repertoires…and embrace an ethos of inclusiveness” (Bennett and Segerberg 2013, 25). Activists can be used as sources by traditional media (as became the case of Pamela Palmater and Hayden King, for instance, who were quickly used as spokespersons for Idle No More because of their location in Toronto, rather than in rural Saskatchewan and Alberta) and large publics can join the movement without even hearing about it through traditional media simply because of the presence of other involved individuals in their digital social networks. Communication, and not hierarchy, allows for or- ganization because “communication mechanisms establish relationships, activate attentive participants, channel various resources, and establish narratives and discourses” (Bennett and Segerberg 2013, 42). However, Idle No More’s resemblance with contemporaneous social movements relying on connective action in terms of its timing and reliance on social media must not obscure its origins and development. Indeed, the significance of the movement has been diminished greatly by its appropriation by its settler allies and by the Western left. Traced back to the Arab Spring and often confused with the Occupy movement, which it is assumed to have adapted to Indigenous cultures, Idle No More has been understood, evaluated, and celebrated (or pronounced dead) on the basis of this misidentification (for examples of this identification, see Wood 2015a, Coates 2015, and Wotherspoon and Hansen 2013). By this logic, Indigenous youth and women were said to have suddenly become politically active because others—Arab youth or, more generally, settlers of the 99%—had risen up, showing them what could be done and that political action was worth pursuing. This logic of appropriation suggests that Indigenous youth and women rose against a state that works toward the interests of a small, extremely privileged group and oppresses the majority but a state that is, nonetheless, their own as part of the majority population. Early on in the movement, however, Coulthard (2012) presented a different origin for the movement: that of other Indigenous movements of struggle. As others did, Coulthard outlined the importance of past actions, such as that of Elijah Harper, the Kanesatake standoff, and the blockades of the 1980s.

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